Consumer demand for Internet services has led to the widespread deployment of application services by service providers in nearly every industry. The growth of such application services has also led to the growth of increasingly complex hardware and software systems supporting a wide assortment of end-user devices and computing environments. Despite their increasingly complex and diverse computing needs, service providers must nevertheless satisfy consumer demand for reliable and continuous access to applications. Maintaining high levels of service availability has led to the widespread use of redundant application and server configurations in which an application service fails over to one or more standby servers if an active server fails. However, the failover process is susceptible to instability if a fault affects the control plane between the active and standby servers.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need for efficient failover detection and recovery.